I love this from Atrios:

I've long been puzzled why we can't steer ourselves towards a better future by overpaying oil companies to build solar and windmills and overpaying war contractors to build SUPERTRAINS. Hell, they can put front mounted missiles on them if they want.

Existing stakeholders have immense political power and we obviously can't wish them away, but can't we bribe them to do good instead of evil?